The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Jon Evans:

I am reminded of: "My old man taught me two things: Always cut cards and stay out of politics."

Whoops. Left the leading word "Answering" off of #4. Anyways, this does does invite the question of what the best thing was before wrapped bread.

A question I've had for many years: what was the best thing before sliced bread?

Also known as "on-the-nose" dialogue. Perhaps the lesson is that Internet trolls require a punch on the nose. Or that if they were in a forum where such a reaction was possible, they wouldn't talk like that.

There's a lot of great stuff about race and rock'n'roll in that era in America in Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung.

Yeah, I emailed them a letter to the editor to that effect earlier today.

One of the things highlighted by l'affaire Jayson Blair was that the mighty New York Times does not use fact checkers - it's entirely up to the individual reporters to get their facts straight.

#6: Shikasta isn't a bad place to start, kind of Olaf Stapledon in feel.

#28: I'm think I would know if Doris Lessing were Canadian. (My father, who was born in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe where she spent a considerable portion of her life, once dated her daughter before he emigrated to Canada.)

Huh. I appear to have spent my entire authorial career slavishly following Lester Dent's guidelines without even knowing it.

I liked The Kingdom as police procedural until its bizarre metamorphosis into a slam-bang action movie. The whole third act seemed a bit like it had been cut out of some other movie and awkwardly grafted on with the sutures still showing.

Two years ago I went to Iraq for Wired magazine and wound up writing a lengthy article about two young Americans who went there to wire the country to the Net.

One of them - who worked in Iraq for years, as the only American in an Iraqi company, and still maintains strong ties to the place - in other words, who knows what he's talking about, said earlier this year, if memory serves, that as far as he's concerned, the best-case scenario is now that a brutal tyrant takes over the country and enforces security with an iron fist.

Again, that's his best-case scenario.

There's an amusing essay/eulogy in today's LA Times from a former WWN, um, reporter - Weekly World News Meets God!

Monsieur Stross #5:

DUI is a provably dangerous activity that has a strong correlation with killing and maiming bystanders.

Yep. But it's not perceived this way by most Los Angelenos. In Canada, in the last thirty years, drunk driving has gone from "socially acceptable" to "instant pariah"; this hasn't happened in L.A. yet. I've been repeatedly shocked by how many otherwise thoughtful and intelligent Angelenos regularly drink (or smoke other intoxicants) and drive.

This has something to do with the geography of L.A. - people drive everywhere, including to parties and bars, and then they have to drive home again, and many people have decided, consciously or not, they'd rather drive drunk than not go out and drink at all. A DUI is seen as an obstacle to avoid/overcome, not as a moral stain.

(For the record, I like Los Angeles.)

I speculate (on anecdotal data, mind) that drinking and driving is in general far more socially acceptable in the USA than in Canada or Europe.

D'oh.
s/enthusastic/enthusiastic
and
s/inclination/no inclination
on #23.

Clifton @ #20 and #21 - It's really not just about royalty rates. Perpetual in-print means that authors will never be able to resell rights to other and more enthusastic publishers, or, if the publisher also retains ebook rights, publish their work online in order to attract more readers.

My first two novels are essentially "in print but unavailable in bookstores" in the USA, but HarperCollins has shown inclination to do any of a) reissue them, b) release the rights, c) support a Creative Commons release. At least I can wait for them to go officially OOP - but if it weren't for the reversion-of-rights clause in my contract, which states that fewer than 250 POD sales/year counts as out-of-print, they'd likely languish with HarperCollins forever.

#35, #47: mess in Uganda? Huh? I spent a few weeks wandering around there a little over a year ago, and while its north is troubled, overall it seems better off than any of its neighbours (and the LRA is very much on the decline.)

Kampala's much safer, cleaner, and friendlier than Nairobi, the countryside is beautiful, the roads are good, the infrastructure is semi-reliable, the people have some opportunity for the first time in no one remembers how long. It has many problems, of course, Museveni's power-clinging being one of them, but there's no quesiton the country has improved enormously compared to Kapuscinski's depictions in The Shadow of the Sun of how it was under Amin and then in the 1980s.

Gordon Grice's The Red Hourglass has a couple of interesting chapters on the domestication of wolves and pigs (and lots of other fascinating stuff too.)

Paris is dotted with posters advertising the upcoming film of the book. (La Terre Vu Au Ciel, in French, iirc). From what I gather it's basically a massive slideshow with narration.

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